The relationship between public research and companies : some rather mad success stories

• Hélène LE DU
  Engineering student, Ecole des Mines
  
• Jean-Baptiste AVRILLIER
  Engineering student, Ecole des Mines
  

Summary

As a subject for their third year dissertation, Ecole des mines engineering students Hélène Le Du and Jean-Baptiste Avrillier chose the relationship between public research and companies, and studied the ways in which it can be improved. They noticed that positive attempts towards improvement came up against numerous factors which opposed change. Rather than listing well-known methods to improve the situation which are never applied, they preferred to concentrate on several case studies which were rather surprising in terms of their success. These included the success of Génopole, a town centred on research and advanced technology created out of nothing in a new town in the Parisian suburbs, whose university was forbidden to teach biology. Another success was the Génoplante network, which managed to get private and public researchers to work closely together, and to take joint decisions on everything. Finally, they cite Philippe Kourilsky's gamble to revitalise the Institut Pasteur in the space of two years, a gamble which is well on the way to being won. Should one recommend a "a touch of madness" in order to break the deadlock ?

Summary translated from French by Rachel MARLIN.

Download the dissertation of Hélène Le Du et Jean-Baptiste Avrillier (in french).

• The entire article was written by Élisabeth BOURGUINAT.

To obtain this article, you can :

• download it for free in French (PDF help) or contact ecopar@paris.ensmp.fr (Reference RT180902).

The entire article appears in French in the Journal de l'École de Paris du management N° 41.